School of Dance Presents 'Knowing Dance More' Series

This series seeks to bring into focus current issues within the production, performance and practice of dance works

Choreographer Dawn Springer

September 6, 2011

Beginning September 7, the School of Dance will host a series of lectures, conversations and informal showings lead by important artists, theorists, scholars and curators in the international field of dance. This series seeks to bring into focus current issues within the production, performance and practice of dance works and to foster ongoing conversations about knowing dance (more).

Susan Leigh Foster
September 7, 2011
11:45 a.m.
Caplan Recital Hall, 17th Floor Terra
"Training for Dancing"This presentation looks at the pressures placed on dancers by both producers and spectators to conform to the demands for dance-spectacle on the global stage. Foster will consider how dancers must become "hired" bodies who are given insufficient time to work with choreographers in order to produce a unique and distinctive vision of what dance can be. Proposing three kinds of hired bodies – the balletic body, the industrial body and the released body – she will examine how their training regimens are affecting dance world-wide.

Choreographer and scholar Susan Leigh Foster is distinguished professor in the department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. She is the author of Reading Dancing, Choreography and Narrative, Dances that Describe Themselves and Choreographing Empathy. She is also editor of Choreographing History, Corporealities and Worlding Dance.

Dawn Springer
September 14, 2011
11:30 a.m.
Dance Theater at the Drake
"So You Think You Can Sell Your Body: Artistry, Agency and Reality Culture"
What happens to agency for dancing women inside reality culture? Does Facebook and "So You Think You Can Dance" create new expectations for female bodies? Examining works in the 2011 Topios, Topio Philly Fringe Festival, choreographer Dawn Springer will think out loud about the ways contemporary female dance artists are dealing with these questions.

Springer is a choreographer and dance artist based in the Mid-Atlantic U.S. She received her BFA from the University of the North Carolina School of the Arts and her MFA from Hollins University. Her creative and scholarly research interests include disrupted formalisms, movement as subversion and relational narratives of the body in performance. She is the current Postgraduate Fellow in Dance at Dickinson College for 2010-2012.

Dr. Carol Brown
November 2, 2011
11:30 a.m.
Dance Theater at the Drake
"Falling Together or, Pleasure and Fear in Interdisciplinary Practice"“The best way to collaborate is to choose the right person to collaborate with, and then trust them implicitly.” –Kevin Volans
As a choreographer I generally collaborate with others – performers, designers, dramaturgs and audiences – to produce performance events. Since 1999 these collaborations have broadened to include a variety of other artists, researchers and practitioners whose work is not generally located in theatrical environments or arrived at through the disciplinary procedures of performance. This shift from making work largely for theatre environments, where I was the main author towards choreography of the expanded field, as dance-architecture, performance installation and site responsive event, has involved forms of co-creation through inter-disciplinary processes. In this talk, I will discuss a number of these projects, the processes of collaboration they gave rise to and the importance of inter-subjectivity for co-authored events.

Carol Brown is an internationally established performer, choreographer and currently senior lecturer in Dance Studies at NICAI, University of Auckland. Her work evolves through collaborative research with artists and scholars from other disciplines, in particular architecture, music and media design. Creative works include theater performances, site responsive interventions, performance installations, interactive dances and dance-architectures. Currently, she is choreographing "SEED" for Subcircle in Philadelphia and is developing the solo, "Revolve," to be premiered at the Body Festival 2011. Formerly choreographer in residence at the Place Theatre, London, Brown’s works have toured throughout the world and she has received numerous awards including a Jerwood Award for Choreography, the Ludwig Forum International Prize for Innovation and a NESTA Dream Time.